Productive Dialog During Collaborative Problem Solving

TL;DR

This study investigates how encouraging students to collaboratively explain their problem-solving steps enhances productive dialogue and error remediation during collaborative learning with an intelligent tutoring system.

Contribution

It demonstrates that collaborative explanations foster error correction through dialogue, offering a novel approach to support novice collaboration in educational settings.

Findings

Collaborative explanations lead to more error remediation in dialogue.

Students rely less on hints when engaging in joint explanations.

Collaborative explanation improves problem-solving dialogue quality.

Abstract

Collaboration is an important problem-solving skill; however, novice collaboration generally benefits from some kind of support. One possibility for supporting productive conversations between collaborators is to encourage pairs of students to provide explanations for their problem-solving steps. To test this possibility, we contrasted individuals who were instructed to self-explain problem-solving steps with dyads who were instructed to jointly explain problem-solving steps in the context of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS). The results suggest that collaboratively developed explanations prompted students to remediate their errors in dialog, as opposed to relying on the ITS for assistance, which is provided in the form of on-demand hints. The paper concludes with a discussion about implications for combining proven learning interventions.